13 Extremely Unexpected Friendships Between Historical Figures

André the Giant was a French professional wrestler who found a friend in the existentialist Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, the author of Waiting for Godot.

When Beckett moved to France in 1953, a man named Boris Rousimoff helped him build his new home. Beckett and Rousimoff became friends and played cards together. One day, Rousimoff told Beckett that he was having trouble getting his son, André, to school. At 12 years old, André was already 6 feet tall and weighed 250 pounds.

Beckett had a truck that was big enough to fit André, and he offered to drive André to school to repay Rousimoff for helping to build his house. While in the truck together, the two men's conversations were mostly about cricket.

Hunter S. Thompson was a journalist and author who symbolized counter culture and loathing the political establishment (AKA Richard Nixon). Pat Buchanan was a conservative politician turned political commentator who advised Nixon. How were these two friends?

Thompson and Buchanan met when Thompson was covering Nixon’s 1972 campaign, and Buchanan was advising the campaign. There’s no clear reason why they became friends, other than that they just enjoyed talking with each other.

When Thompson was asked about Buchanan during a 2003 interview, he said: “We’re still friends. Patrick is a libertarian, or at least in that direction. I think of politics as a circle, not a spectrum of one line not just right and left. Patrick and I are often pretty close. Patrick’s an honest person. He’s a straight guy and a very smart guy.”

Does it count as being best friends if one person just really likes and admires the other person and invites them to all of their birthday parties? Colonel Sanders would probably say yes, seeing as he desperately wanted to start a bromance with FBI head J. Edgar Hoover. Excerpts from the FBI file that Hoover directed be kept on Sanders attest to this fact. One birthday invitation that Sanders wrote to Hoover really captures the "friendship" between the two men:

"Dear Mr. Hoover,

It's not very often that people of our age can get together and celebrate, but I've found a good excuse. On September 16th, I'm going to be 80 years old. To help me enjoy the day, I'd like to have you and a group of us old folk come on down to Louisville as my guests. I do believe that us folk can show can show those young people what celebratin's all about."

Max Gendelman was a Jewish American soldier who fought in World War II. Karl Kirschner was a German pilot in the war. By all historical accounts, these two should have been enemies. But under traumatizing circumstances, the two formed a friendship.

Gendelman was captured by the Germans in 1944. He made two unsuccessful attempts to escape before he met Kirschner at a prison camp in Lind. Kirschner had been wounded in combat and was recovering on his family’s farm, which was next to the prison camp. Kirschner befriended Gendelman, helping him climb through a fence so the two could play chess and drink coffee together.

Kirschner eventually helped Gendelman escape for good, by pretending to escort him to another camp. Gendelman came home to his family, and in 1952, he helped Kirschner come to the United States as well.

Gendelman said of the friendship, “We saw in each other an immediate connection, a brother."

You probably know that Alexander Graham Bell is famous for inventing the telephone. But you may not know that Bell also spent many years teaching deaf children to speak and advocating for deaf education. Helen Keller’s parents were referred to Bell by an eye doctor, after he informed them that he could not restore their daughter’s sight. Bell was the one responsible for getting Anne Sullivan to be Helen Keller’s in-home teacher.

Bell even took it upon himself to set up a trust fund for Keller so she could attend Radcliffe College where, in 1904, she became the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree. Keller dedicated her autobiography, The Story of My Life, to Bell. She wrote, “To Alexander Graham Bell, who has taught the deaf to speak and enabled the listening ear to hear speech from the Atlantic to the Rockies.”

Ulysses S. Grant was the commander of the Union Army during the American Civil War. James Longstreet fought for the Confederate Army,and became one of General Robert E. Lee’s most trusted officers. That should make them natural-born enemies, right? Nope.

Grant and Longstreet became friends when they were cadets at West Point. They went their separate ways in the late 1840s, but they reunited at the end of the Civil War. In fact, it was Longstreet who convinced General Lee to surrender, knowing that Grant would offer generous terms. As soon as Grant saw Longstreet, he warmly shook his hand and asked him to play a game of brag (a card game) for old time’s sake.

After the war, Longstreet moved to New Orleans and expressed strong support for the Reconstruction.